Literary Terms Week 3

"Heroes and Villians versus Protagonists and Antagonists"

Nearly all literature, with maybe the exception of some poetry, is character driven. Stories are about people. And like most people, there are some we can trust, and some we cannot. You'll have to decide this for yourselves. Sometimes we hear about people (or characters) from their own stories (1st person), sometimes someone else tells us the story, like a narrator or another character. These are important details for us to consider. Just like in our everyday lives, sometimes we can trust our sources, and sometimes we are only getting part of the story. Now, enough about who's telling the story for now, let's look at the characters themselves.

In order for characters to hold our attention, they need to do things. They should go on quests, fall in love, go off to battle, fight against dark forces in intergalactic wars, or fill millions of balloons with hot air and sail away to Paradise. Sometimes, these journeys are great. Sometimes they are simple--a conversation with a visitor, a letter arriving, or a drink in the bar. Th emain thing, is the character needs to change. They must grow, learn, mature, or whatever. If they do not change at all, they are static characters, or flat characters. They stay the same. These flat characters can also be stock characters, "the mad scientist," "the cheerleader," "the dumb jock," "the wizard." But the most interesting characters change, are complex, and are often more realistic than the other characers. These are round characters. Our round characters are almost always the major characters. Sometimes, we have a great foil character, which helps us to better understand our main characters by revealing traits in our major characters. Think Dr. Watson with Sherlock Holmes, or Ron Weasely with Harry Potter. 

Now that you have a basic understanding of character, I want to leave you with a caution: Characters are not people. Now, I know this is quite disappointing. At least it was for me considering Mark Darcy, and I realized that although I greatly adore Gandalf, the closest person to him in my reality is my cat named in his honor. But here's the real takeaway from this message: While characters might, in fact, be constructed after a real person, they are not really that person. A writer is a puppet master. They can will their character to do and say anything they wish. And just because a writer might have based such a character off of somebody in their life does not mean we can then ascribe said details to the actual person, or in literary analysis, vice versa. Characters are constructed of words. And these words, so carefully manipulated to bring life to the character, give us a couple of really cool lenses to make meaning. First, we have the products of the writer's imagination. Second, we get a product of our own imagination, and this is the part that is most fascinating to me, and will likely inform the assignments you will have in class. For example, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a little novel called The Great Gatsby. Perhaps you've heard of it. Within this novel, he created a character named Daisy Buchanan, whom both he and many other critics love to hate. She's vain, vapid, and poor Gatsby loses everything trying to please her. Or, at least that's a version Fitzgerald and many others like to give us. But I read into her character something different. I felt sorry for her. I thought she was getting a lot of blame and mistreatment from some of the other major characters. We rarely get to "hear" from Daisy ourselves, only those around her. And I've never been a fan of gossip. When I look at her character and keep a healthy dose of skepticism for my narrator, I bring another "reading" to the character. Remember when I said that sometimes we can't trust those folks telling us stories? Those are called unreliable narrators, which is just a fancy and nice set of terms for someone who bends the truth (a liar) to persuade our interpretation.  We'll talk more about narrators in class, and we will read some stories for you to see if we should trust a narrator or not.  

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 Here are some helpful terms.

Character—"any personage in a literary work who acts, appears, or is referred to as playing a part" (219).

Personage--A personage may or may not be a human being, but will "have at least some human qualities" (219).

Types of Characters--

Major characters—Characters "we see more of over time; we learn more about them, and we think of them as more complex and, frequently, as more 'realistic' than minor characters" (220).

Minor characters--often created to simply "fill out the story" (220). 

Foil—Minor characters may sometimes have important roles and may function as a foil or "a character that helps by way of contrast to reveal the unique qualities of another (especially main character" (220).

Round characters--"Characters that act from varied, often conflicting motives, impulses, and desires, and who seem to have psychological complexity" (220).

Flat characters—"Characters that  behave and speak in predictable or repetitive (if sometimes odd) ways" (220). Also known as Static characters--Characters who do not change

Stock characters—"Flat characters who represent a familiar, frequently recurring type--the dumb blond, the made scientist, the inept sidekick, the plain yet ever-sympathetic best friend" (221).

Archetypes--"Characters that recur in the myths and literature of many different ages and cultures" (221).

Dynamic characters—Characters who change. "Roundness and dynamism tend to go together. But the two qualities are distinct, and one does not require the other: Not all round characters are dynamic; not all dynamic characters are round" (220).